Nowhere near the level of complexity that would enter your threat model. But this would be the first, minimal step towards customers building their own tools, and the fact that not even this workflow has entered the zeitgeist is... well, it's not the best news for some of the most bullish projections of AI adoption in businesses large and small.
That would be similar to your solution, so either one would work.
I think that there might be some similar alternatives (maybe Airtable? probably using Lovable or Firebase counts) but nothing that is available for me for now.
It's just that the hassle of dealing with that platform tends to be similar to the hassle of setting up an app yourself, and now you're paying a per-user license cost.
APEX is probably just as widely used now as Access was. Access likely had higher market share but of a much smaller market. There are gazillions of APEX apps out there.
In my experience, it's actually quite hard to move a business from an excel sheet to software. Because an excel sheet allows the end user to easily handle every edge case and they likely don't even think in terms of "edge cases"
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/copilot-function-...
Whilst you could plausibly argue that Microsoft have spent the past 25 years attempting to stamp them out, this is exactly what VB6 and VBA were.
People built whole businesses on/around these technologies, and people liked them because you could get something working fast. As maligned as they are nowadays they were so widely used because they delivered value.